17 July 2013 7:45 PM

A few years ago a friend who had a job in the NHS told me a
story about her day at work.

I have no reason to believe she made it up.

This was at the time when Tony Blair and Gordon
Brown were pumping large sums of money into the Health Service in the fond hope
that it would make all those words about being the envy of the world come true.

Among other effects, they gave Sue a
career boost.

You wouldn’t say that Sue had been much of a
stayer in any of her previous occupations. She dropped out of university. Then
she dropped out of teacher training. She took a job looking after children in a
nursery, and dropped out of that, too.

Naturally, when the local NHS Trust started to
throw its cash around, it took Sue on. As a management trainer.

You may wonder why any organisation would hire
someone who had never lasted the course in any task, or taken control of
anything more demanding than an evening’s drinking, to train its managers. But
there it is. The truth of that much I can vouch for.

Sue’s training regime involved taking role-play
sessions, in which selected staff would be asked to, well, play roles. All good
management trainers do this, apparently.

She went down to one of the Trust’s smaller
hospitals, where she was to spend a morning developing the role-play skills of
various administrators and nursing worthies. Very senior people in the Trust
were keen to see their bureaucrats get properly trained, so they insisted all
nominated staff go to the session, and take it seriously.

To set an example, the chairman and the
chief executive of the Trust decided to join in themselves.

At the hospital, Sue asked where she could run
her session. Ah, yes, said the local managers, we do happen to have some space
free.

This turned out to be a ward. It was freshly
built, painted, and equipped. It had all the beds, curtains, furniture
and gadgets with tubes and electronic gizmos you expect to find on a
properly-maintained general hospital ward.

What it didn’t have was any patients.
This was because of a shortage of nurses, which meant the ward remained closed,
and free for staff training purposes.

Sue joined her flock of trainees on the empty
ward. She announced that they were going to do a role-play game, and that half
of those present would pretend to be chickens. They would act like chickens
while the other half looked on to encourage and judge them on how well they
were doing.

Soon after the exercise had begun, Sue began to
reflect on the nature of the Health Service.

She was at this point watching the
chairman and chief executive of a multi-billion pound NHS Trust bouncing up and
down on the beds of a seriously expensive but entirely unused new hospital
ward, waving their elbows up and down and going cluck, cluck, cluck.

I cannot assure you that this is true. I can,
however, give you my view, which is that it would take the combined
imaginations of Charles Dickens and J.K.Rowling to dream that one up from
scratch. Despite Sue’s many merits, J.K.Rowling she ain’t.

And the story tells us something important
about the Health Service: don’t believe the figures, believe the anecdotes.

There are a lot of numbers always being thrown
around about the NHS. They prove the Health Service is the most efficient
medical organisation in the world, and the least efficient. They prove that
people are getting more and better operations than ever before, and they prove
that waiting lists are awful and aftercare worse.

They prove that all those managers are
dedicated and effective, and they prove that they are incompetent and ruinously
expensive. They will leave anyone who takes them seriously thoroughly confused.

Instead, listen to what friends and neighbours
say about their own experiences, and remember what has happened to you.
Remember when a casualty department was quick, successful and kind, and
remember the other time when you waited for hours for treatment of a child that
was offered by indifferent nurses and turned out to be borderline decent and
years out of date.

In the end it is not the succession of dismal
official reports that have persuaded most of us that old people often suffer
cruelly in hospitals. It is seeing the wards ourselves, and hearing what
happened to people we know.

It is the anecdotes about Mid-Staffordshire –
the patients trying to get a drink out of flower vases – that say more about
the Health Service than the headcount of the prematurely dead.

It wasn’t numbers of patients or the size
of incentives or the assurances of the experts that impressed Baroness
Neuberger’s Liverpool Care Pathway inquiry panel. Rather the stories of
hundreds of patients persuaded them that a supposedly foolproof system for
comforting the dying had turned into an NHS version of Logan’s Run.

04 July 2013 7:21 PM

First off, it
seems the United Nations says we have had the hottest few years the planet has
experienced, ever. Up until 2007, anyway.

All right, it
has been a bit cooler since then, but the Corporation had a reporter in Death
Valley to tell us it was still very hot there, and, after all, he informed us,
it’s the extremes that count.

Personally, I’m
not planning to live in Death Valley, partly because I have suspicions about
how it got its name. During the California Gold Rush of 1849, if you must know.

But since we
have now been assured that the BBC is no longer biased to any degree, we must
take these climate change warnings at face value.

Then we had
someone on the radio saying all the orangutans in Indonesia are being wiped
out because all the forests are being felled to make room for palm oil
plantations.

The Today
Programme didn’t seem to have much interest in exploring why the forests are
being cut down to produce palm oil, so let me help. Palm oil is used to make
biodiesel, which fuels buses and so on around the Western world, because
governments encourage it.

But why do
governments encourage it?

Because the green lobby, a decade ago or so, told
them to, because it would save the planet. Tony Blair’s government was all for
it, urged on by Friends of the Earth, Guardian columnists and so on.

Oh well, you
can’t get everything right.

We have to
concentrate on what we can do to save the planet today, which is to put less
water in the kettle and take shorter showers.

This advice is
provided by the Energy Saving Trust, which is reported by the BBC, in all
seriousness, as saying that three quarters of all households overfill their
kettles and this wastes £68 million a year.

Based on a study
of 86,000 homes, it also said that the average shower takes seven and a half
minutes and if people got out of the shower a minute earlier it would save us
£215 million.

The study turns
out to be based on answers to an online questionnaire. I’m sure it’s all very
properly done with very tight controls and sound methodology. Even so, you
would have thought there was room for a little scepticism about how overfilling
kettles costs us all £68 million a year, as opposed to, say, £66 million, or
£36 million, or double the number you first thought of.

To give the
Energy Saving Trust credit, it does mention this, in the small print that the
BBC failed to report.

It turns out
that the 86,000 figure is what you get when 100,000 questionnaire replies have been
‘cleansed’ to remove ‘irregular’ answers. Then, as the BBC didn’t mention, that
86,000 was more than halved again to under 39,000 after answers that were not
‘fully explicit’ were removed.

Then, the Trust said: ‘The data points collected
were self-reported answers to closed questions, and we recognise that there are
a number of potential biases present in this type of approach. Where
possible we have sought to evaluate our results against recognised benchmarks
and this has revealed strong validity. These are aspects which we hope to
explore further in Phase Two.’

You get the picture.

I don’t blame
the Energy Saving Trust for coming up with pretty rounded figures, because
sometimes hard and accurate numbers can be very difficult to get hold of.

As an
example, let’s take the salaries of senior executives at the Energy Saving
Trust. Let’s start with the pay of chief executive Philip Selwood and chairman
Ted Brown.

Here is what the
Trust says: ‘We are not a public company and as such don’t prepare a separate
remuneration report/details of salaries. Details
of remuneration paid are in our accounts which are filed annually at Companies
House.’

Or, broadly
translated, go to hell.

Personally,
I think life is too short to spend time and money checking out the salaries of
these characters, and of course I would hesitate to add to the world’s deadly
cargo of carbon dioxide by schlepping down to Companies House.

You will just
have to make an informed guess, pretty much like the Energy Saving Trust did
when it calculated the money that is wasted boiling kettles.

You might think,
however, that this is all about as transparent as the tap water in a fracking
zone. We are supposed to live in an age when highly-paid public officials can
no longer keep their salaries secret.

Public
officials? Didn’t the Energy Saving Trust say it wasn’t a public company?

Yes, it did, but
that doesn’t mean for a minute that it lives off its own money.

The Trust has
published an annual review for 2011/12, which is astonishingly short on
financial information but which does have a page on ‘our funding’.

This comes down
to: Department of Energy and Climate Change, £28,468,419; Welsh Government
£1,528,990; Department for Transport £3,584,164; Scottish Government
£19,614,670; other £4,966,452.

There are
no details at all on where the other bit comes from. We’ll all just have to
guess again. The only solid thing we can tell is that, in the financial year
2011/12, the Energy Saving Trust took well over 90 per cent of its £58 million
funding, north of £50 million, from the taxpayer.

Nice work if you
can get it.

My proposal is
this. Instead of saving £50 million of that wasted £68 million by filling our
kettles less full, let’s make as much tea as we like. Instead we can save £50
million a year by shutting down the Energy Saving Trust.

Share this article:

23 June 2013 11:16 PM

There will be, after the
latest military redundancies have taken effect, around 82,000 soldiers in the
army, its smallest strength for 200 years.

This is almost
exactly half the number of lawyers in the country.

Members of
the armed forces take things like the sack with the same sort of stoic
resignation with which they take orders.

They generally keep
their dignity even when severely provoked by hearing about average £10,000
performance bonuses for Ministry of Defence bureaucrats of questionable
competence.

Lawyers less so.

You will
have noticed a lot of protest recently from lawyers and judges about legal aid
cuts. The rule of law is at stake, the sacred principle of access to justice is
threatened, it’s illegal under equality law, and, the worst of it, there won’t
be enough taxpayer money to keep all the lawyers in employment.

The latest in
the campaign to halt this terrible injustice is a lawyers’ mass lobby of
Parliament to be held next week. Do not mock. This could turn nasty. Lawyers
also outnumber policemen, so there is a prospect of the bewigged dispossessed
creating scenes reminiscent of Turkey or Brazil.

The good news is
that the judiciary have taken steps to prevent the disaster of unemployment in
the legal profession with a spectacularly original Supreme Court ruling. This
says that the Human Rights Act applies to British forces in action abroad.

The judgement
has a lot of implications, but it’s safe to sum them up in the Bolshevik-style
slogan that gets to the heart of the Human Rights Act: All Power to the
Lawyers!

Just as the
Bolsheviks sent Red Army officers to war with commissars alongside to ensure
their political correctness, this will mean that in future British army
officers had better make sure they have a lawyer handy any time they think
about giving an order.

The process
is already happening. Royal Navy warships now go to sea with trained lawyers on
the bridge, ready to act ‘as advisers to
deployed operational commanders’.

Plenty of work
here for the solicitors and barristers no longer getting legal aid for
long-drawn out immigration cases. Soldiers will get access to justice. The rule
of law will be upheld on the battlefield. The threat of legal redundancies will
be greatly reduced.

All good things
require change among the reactionary element whose views the Guardian has
started characterising as ‘wicked’, and the stuck-in-the-mud military must drop
its misgivings and learn to love human rights.

Part of this
should be a new understanding of the history that fires the fighting spirit of
the forces. Regiments, warships and squadrons must take a rights-based look at
their own past.

The army must no
longer celebrate Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim. Instead
military lawyers will concern themselves with his wife’s remark on the
aftermath of this regrettable conflict: ‘The Duke returned from the wars today and did
pleasure me in his top-boots.’

I know it’s a long time ago and the Duke is a little bit dead,
but so is Jimmy Savile and that hasn’t stopped the police and the lawyers. I
look forward to a CPS lawyer appearing in front of the cameras to announce the
posthumous rape charge.

The Battle of Trafalgar will be noted for Nelson’s inspiring
signal: ‘The United Kingdom respects every person’s human rights.’

David Cameron will finally get around to announcing Government
involvement in the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of
Waterloo. Maria Miller will explain how the culmination of the Napoleonic wars
was the outcome of Britain’s need to establish a strong European executive in
Brussels.

The charge of the Light Brigade will be misconduct in public
office. The names of Lords Raglan, Lucan and Cardigan will be suppressed and
forgotten, on the orders of the courts, because of the Data Protection Act.

No need to worry about rewriting the history of World War One.
Mr Cameron and Mrs Miller already have the process under way.

In order to encourage the troops and win round sceptical
members of the public, we should have remakes of war films to underline the new
values.

I am sure the BBC and Channel 4 have already gone into
production following my suggestion a few months ago of naval sagas In Which We
Serve a Writ; Legal Action in the North Atlantic; Tag the Bismarck! and the
greatest convoy story of them all, The QC.

We need some more TV series concentrating on the gritty realities
of war. Ice Cold in El Vinos, Reach for the Port, and 633 King’s Bench Walk
Squadron await scriptwriters.

The suffering of captured soldiers will be marked by The Brief
on the River Kwai, in which the Japanese give the prisoners the vote. The cunning
of POWs bribing guards for the materials to make wigs and red ribbons will be
recorded in The Article Eight Escape.

Hollywood can get stuck in with Suing Private Ryan and for
fans of secret adventure the big screen must have The Guns of Santorini.

As Major Clipton observed at the end of River Kwai:
madness, madness. But the judges of the Supreme Court might have considered
that before their obsession with human rights blinded them to the point that
offering a legal right to life and privacy to a soldier at war is the ripest
nonsense.

Perhaps there should have been just one war film remake, and
it should have been done for the sake of a single special showing to the
justices of the Supreme Court. A Brief Too Far.

Share this article:

12 June 2013 7:06 PM

It is an appalling thing, but it seems some women may have
succeeded in getting on in the world of music with the help of their looks.

We are indebted for this insight to Jenni Murray, the
presenter of Woman’s Hour on Radio Four, who has told us ‘the women who seem to
be most welcome are the ones who are prepared to go along with the old idea
that sex sells.’

Perhaps that is why there are so few women composers whose
work we hear in the concert halls and opera houses. If only they had had the
chance to do a turn on the catwalk, perhaps a bikini round, interviews in which
they could talk about their ambition to be an all-round entertainer, then we
might get the odd female-penned tone poem in the Proms.

Or not.

Perhaps it might be instead that Dame Jenni has opened her
mouth with the knee-jerk feminism gear engaged, without regard to tyre wear or
road conditions.

There are a few things that stick in the throat about her
condemnation of sexism in the music world.

The first is the bizarre notion that Jenni Murray appears to
have picked up somewhere that music should be a pure and noble art, untouched
by low and contemptible distractions like sex or showbiz.

I would have thought that performers have been very
obviously using sex to sell elite music to the crowned heads of Europe and
anybody else with any money to pay for it since about the beginning of the 17th
century. Roll over Vivaldi, tell Monteverdi the news.

And the very idea that anybody might try to puff music with
cheap publicity and glamour is entirely offensive, except to Miss Murray’s
employers at the BBC who use exactly those methods to promote the Proms and
Radio Three, and to anybody else over the centuries who ever tried to turn an
honest shilling by advertising to attract an audience.

Then we have Dame Jenni’s list of shame, in which she
trotted out examples of how women have been ‘downgraded, excluded and downright
insulted’ in various instances. There was the conductor who didn’t want fat
women in his orchestra and the percussionist teased about her cymbals, not to
mention the woodwind player subjected to sexual innuendo.

Apparently there was a case in which an orchestra member was
told she was taking a man’s job and should be at home looking after her
children. This happened as recently as 1959, according to Dame Jenni. All very regrettable and unfair.

But, unfortunately, people do behave badly, even in modern
times. We all wish it were otherwise, but there it is. Music has never been
free of the prejudices that infect the rest of the world. If you wanted to look
at the underside of the history of music, you might, for example, find a bit of
anti-semitism there as well.

Is that any reason to pick on the women performers who
succeed?

But that is precisely what Dame Jenni does.

Harping on her theme about how the successful female
musicians are the ones who sell sex, she said: ‘Look at the way violinist
Nicola Benedetti and trumpeter Alison Balsom are marketed.’

What are the highly glamorous Benedetti and Balsom supposed
to do? Suppress their pictures and demand their recordings are sold under plain
cover? Shave their hair, dress frumpy, and try to look ordinary while they
play?

It seems, however, that according to the musical morality of
Jenni Murray, there are legitimate ways in which someone might resort to
shameless self-promotion.

You may, for example, take advantage of your position as a
famous radio presenter to seize the chance to show off by conducting the BBC
Philharmonic Orchestra, when your programme does a special about women in
music.

Dame Jenni, who will entertain us with the overture to
Carmen after first taking an hour’s tuition from conductor Jessica Cottis,
admits to a musical career which amounted to four piano lessons and a spell as
triangle in her school band

Quiet at the back there. It’s nothing to do with Kate
O’Mara’s Triangle.

I’m sure Dame Jenni is using her celebrity selflessly to
advance the cause of women in music.

It’s just that I can’t help feeling she might have given the
airtime and the exposure to someone else, perhaps a young woman conductor, who
might have liked the chance to reach a wider audience than usual.

I’m going to give Dame Jenni’s effort a miss, and stick to
Benedetti and Balsom. They may not score highly on Murray scale of feminist
purity. But at least they can play their instruments.

Share this article:

22 May 2013 8:29 PM

Not many people read or hear
the Book of Common Prayer these days. Most of the clergy of the Church of
England give the impression of disliking it, some are viciously hostile, and
churchgoers have to hunt around for services that use it.

Comedians don’t
even make fun of it. You might have thought all that archaic language would
have been an easy target, but perhaps memories of the old church services have
all but died out, or perhaps something about them defies mockery.

Observe how
when Rowan Atkinson goes on Children in Need, he chooses to take the rise out
of the way modernising archbishops talk. He gets complaints for incorporating
modern sexual slang.

Political
leaders, even those who have had the benefit of an expensive education, give
the impression they are unfamiliar with Thomas Cranmer’s prayer book. This is a
pity, because the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, was a
foundation stone of the emerging English nation and guided the institutions of
the country for centuries.

Its wording was,
for example, adopted by the Victorians for the non-religious civil marriage
ceremony. The old register office legal vows were altered by legislation less
than 20 years ago, at the prompting of a Roman Catholic Tory MP concerned
mainly about anti-Catholic discrimination.

So if you want to
get a grip on England’s historic understanding of the institution of marriage,
you could do worse than refer to the prayer book, which says ‘it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be
brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy
Name.’

Pretty clear I think. What else?

‘Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid
fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry,
and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.’

Shades of Rowan Atkinson there. That may be why our clergy are
now so shy of the old prayer book. But you can’t misunderstand.

And?

‘Thirdly, it was ordained for the mutual society, help, and
comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and
adversity. Into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be
joined.’

You can argue with some effect that points two and three speak
in favour of same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, if you want to maintain that
same-sex marriage is in keeping with the finest British tradition and practice,
you have a problem with point one.

The more so since the BCP goes out of its way to insist the
marriage ceremony involves ‘this man and this woman’.

One further thing about the old prayer book. It has a quaint
old ‘table of kindred and affinity’, which lists at length the relatives people
may not marry, starting with their own children and stretching to son’s son’s
wife and daughter’s daughter’s husband. This is where 16th century religious
doctrine and practicality met.

The essential prayer book kith and kin rules still apply,
through the 1949 Marriage Act which remains the basis of marriage law.

So when Culture Secretary Maria Miller told the Commons during
the same-sex marriage debate that ‘people should not be excluded from marriage,
simply because of who they love’, she was saying something that departs
radically from previous understanding.

When she told MPs that the values of marriage are the values
upon which society is built, and ‘they must be values available to all,
underpinning an institution available to all couples,’ she was talking through
her hat.

When she told the Commons that marriage has evolved, that
evolution has been strictly limited. Easier divorce, yes. Weddings in stately
homes, yes. A public lifetime legal bond between a man and a woman? That only
began to change in October 2011, at the Tory Party conference, thanks to the
Prime Minister.

David Cameron spoke on BBC Radio Four’s Today Programme
following the debate. He said: 'I think marriage is a
wonderful institution, it helps people to commit to each other. I think it’s
such a good institution it should be available to gay people as well as
heterosexuals.’

This is not a conservative
position. It is a call for upheaval.

Mr Cameron and Mrs
Miller may well be right when they say that same-sex marriage is the right
thing to do, that it will spread the benefits of marriage, and that it brings
Britain in line with what is happening in the rest of the developed world.

The alarm felt by their
critics may well be misplaced.

But when Mr Cameron says
he supports gay marriage ‘because I’m a Conservative’, he needs to understand
why conservatives might decide they are no longer Conservatives.

Share this article:

15 May 2013 7:11 PM

At what point did the spying
trade turn into a branch of the public relations industry?

I blame Alastair
Campbell, who, confronted with the necessity of selling an unpopular war,
redefined the Secret Intelligence Service as an auxiliary spin machine. The
proper role of Britain’s spies, Campbell maintained, was to supply propaganda
material for the Prime Minister to feed to the media.

It is not clear
that the chieftains of MI6 were wrong when they obediently followed Campbell’s
instructions and tried to make it look as if they really believed Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

No good in
upsetting the government, what with all those salaries to be paid and lots of
cooks and cleaners to keep going at that silly headquarters in Vauxhall, not to
mention the office heating bills.

But look where
it has all led. Now we have an unfortunate American junior diplomat arrested in
Moscow in front of the cameras and paraded all over Russian TV wearing a daft
blonde wig, in the company of a number of embarrassed-looking superiors.

Ryan Fogle, said
to be a CIA agent, is accused by the Russians of ‘provocative actions in the
spirit of the Cold War’, or, more specifically, trying to recruit a Russian
informant.

The Russians
have always made very good spies. But when it comes to spy literature they are
a bit behind the curve. And their PR hasn’t improved since the days when GUM
was the only department store in Moscow and its windows displayed tins of
sardines and Rosa Klebb-brand lingerie.

Memo to the
Lubyanka: if you want people to believe your spy capture coup, forget the wigs.
Both of them. And the sunglasses. And the map and the knife. And the compass,
please. Watch the western movies more carefully – even in something as dated as
the James Bond franchise they use satnavs now.

In particular,
everyone is going to laugh at the notion that American spies present their
Russian informers with letters of contract. ‘We eagerly await the possibility
of working with you in the near future,’ indeed.

I don’t
remember that George Smiley’s Moscow Rules had anything about letters of
appointment for agents. The main methods of recruitment in the good old days
appear to have been blackmail and bribery, which are rarely conducted in
writing.

All this dreadfully
crude stuff just undermines the point you are trying to make about those evil
interfering Americans, whatever it might be. Probably along the lines of ha-ha,
you decadent USA, your spies are so stupid compared to our hot tottie Anna
Chapman, or something equally significant.

Perhaps the
Russians feel ignored now the world domination stakes of the Cold War have
declined to the point where most serious Russian threat comes from their
gangsters bumping each other off in London. Some innocent bystander might get
hurt one day.

The trouble is
that there is still a use for properly conducted spying. The Americans might
have captured the Boston bombers before it was too late if they had bothered to
listen more carefully to Moscow about suspicious Chechens.

American
interest seems to be pointed elsewhere. Very successful so in some cases.
Witness the superb Stuxnet coup, in which a computer worm that started off
alarming every technology geek in the western world turned out to be damaging
only when introduced into nuclear centrifuges in an Iranian bomb factory.

Perhaps there is
Washington activity in London too. We discover that the Bloomberg news agency
has been selling £13,000-a-year information terminals – sort of up-dated stock
market tickers – to the Governor of the Bank of England Sir Mervyn King and his
senior colleagues. Then the agency’s journalists have been looking at what Sir
Mervyn’s been looking at.

Just Bloomberg
journalists? Really?

In contrast with
adventures in Moscow, this trick is as safe as houses. If a journalist from
News International were to so much as ask for Hugh Grant’s mobile number, there
would be half a dozen dawn raids followed by the establishment of a 120-strong
Met Police detection team and, a year later, serious criminal charges.

Being that the
Bloomberg affair involves bankers, the City, and very large sums of money,
nothing criminal can have happened.

Our own boys and
girls are capable of pulling the odd stunt with technology when they put their
minds to it. A few years ago, before the Athens Olympics, the Greek government
felt it needed a new secure mobile phone network. It turned out that Vodafone,
who are based in Newbury, had just the thing they needed.

The new system
worked like a dream, throughout the Olympics, putting the Greek prime minister
in instant contact with his cabinet and his military, security and police
chiefs. And also MI6.

The Greeks were
rather angry when they found out, a couple of years later. They have probably
calmed down a bit now that they have other things to worry about.

I would like to
think there is still some properly applied spying going on behind the PR
puffery. There are certainly plenty of worthwhile targets.

The Security
Service could start by finding out, in advance of the last Premier League
fixtures, which Italian restaurant the Tottenham team plan to gather in on
Saturday evening.

07 May 2013 1:26 AM

For example,
there was a Radio Five football talk-in last week that was trying to find
suitable pop songs to mark the fate of various figures at the end of the
season.

Well, for Neil
Warnock, we’ll have Bo Diddley singing Mona. Jose Bosingwa of poor relegated
QPR must have the Beatles: how can you laugh when you know I’m down? It’s just
too simple, like taking candy off Perry Groves.

Similarly,
it should not be too difficult for the football authorities to work out the
solution to the Luis Suarez problem.

I take into
account that you would not in ordinary circumstances trust the average
administrator involved in running football to cross the road by himself. I understand
that we are dealing with a business whose chieftains, having got themselves
into a bit of a tangle over racism, thought it was a good idea to invite
sensitive comedian Reginald D. Hunter to tell the odd colourful joke at an
awards dinner.

But have none of
them ever watched Silence of the Lambs?

All the time
these days you see players wearing odd ancillary headgear that looks like it
was bought from a bondage website. Chelsea alone have a goalkeeper who
resembles Brainiac and a striker who takes the art of hiding to the point of
hiding his identity with a mask.

For some
players, face coverings should be compulsory rather than optional. Suarez would
no longer chew on his opponents if required to play with the mask that so
became that other notorious biter, Hannibal Lecter.

That way we also
get another football tune. Suarez can have Lecter’s favourite aria from the
Goldberg Variations.

Politics too can
be a simple matter, as the success of Nigel Farage illustrates. You just take
everything the voters hate and do the opposite, and, hey presto, people will
vote for you.

How Mr Farage
must have enjoyed his bank holiday after reading of the Coalition’s latest
attempt to counter UKIP success. As a demonstration that they really do not get
it, you could not ask for better.

The new plan,
apparently to be included in the Government’s legislative programme, will stop
state pensions going to nasty foreigners who have ‘never set foot in Britain at
all’. The LibDem pensions minister, Steve Webb, complains that under the
present system 220,000 people outside the country are getting state pensions
based purely on their spouse’s work history.

‘Folk who have never
been here but happen to be married to someone who has are getting pensions,’ Mr
Webb said.

How brilliant of Mr
Webb to upset all those people tempted to vote for UKIP all over again twice in
one scheme.

First, he has
taken what is about the one genuinely contributory benefit left in the welfare
system and attacked it.

It probably occurred
to a minister from a party that took a bit of a caning in last week’s elections
that the benefits system is not very popular. What Mr Webb
hasn’t worked out is why.

It is mainly
because lots of people are getting something for nothing out of it. Every poll
and survey is suggesting that the great majority of the country wants to see a
benefits system which pays out instead to those who have contributed something.

Mr Webb can’t
see this at all. You may remember that back in 2005 he was found to have
claimed £545 in tax credits because of his low MP’s salary, despite also
claiming £113,258 in parliamentary expenses.

Benefits, taxes,
they’re all the same, you see, in Webbworld, so there’s nothing wrong with
claiming a benefit aimed at the poor even though you are most definitely not
poor, as long as you can fit in with the letter of the rules.

Then, secondly,
there is that troubling reference to people who ‘happen to be married’. Pretty
much like they might happen to be a QPR fan or happen to catch flu.

Mr Webb thinks
it is wrong for all these foreigners to get a share of their spouse’s state
pension just because they are married.

In
Webbworld, someone who has earned a state pension should not expect payments to
his wife to continue after he dies, because she is a foreigner and because
marriage shouldn’t count for anything.

David Cameron
has a bad blind spot about marriage. He promised tax breaks for married couples
because he thought it would reassure the reactionaries, and then dropped the
idea as soon as he was safely inside Downing Street.

In its
place he offered same-sex marriage, introduced, in one of the most
self-destructive phrases ever coined by a politician, ‘because I’m a
Conservative.’ One poll last week suggested same-sex marriage alone
disillusioned a quarter of the Tory voters of 2010.

Perhaps Mr
Cameron was happy to see Mr Webb start the fightback against UKIP because Mr
Webb went to a comprehensive school. No chumocracy there. Ding! Box ticked.

And the pensions
minister was being disparaging about foreigners. Mr Cameron appears to take the
view that all this fuss about immigration is because lots of Tory voters are
xenophobic, so he had better do something mean to foreigners. Ding! Box ticked.

The trouble with
Mr Cameron is not that he is failing to get his message across, nor that he has
miscalled the loyalty of right-wing voters, nor that he is too ready to tie
himself to unpopular minority causes. The trouble is that his judgement is
poor. Reading a list compiled by one pundit, I got to more than a dozen
unnecessary disasters before I gave up counting, and that didn’t even include
his law for higher foreign aid spending.

When he pitched
himself as the heir to Blair, Cameron forgot the Marxist cliches he must have
been stuffed with while doing PPE at Oxford. In particular, the one about
history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as
farce.

Mr Webb’s
attempt to boost the Coalition’s fortunes just underlines that the Tories have
something to learn from the easy simplicities of football. When things go
wrong, sack the manager.

Share this article:

23 April 2013 12:07 AM

I’ve never had much time for
EastEnders. It always seems to be full of deeply unpleasant characters who bear
no resemblance at all to anyone you ever actually met.

It doesn’t have
any of the wit that is the saving grace of Coronation Street. I am afraid I
have tended to dismiss it as one more West End take on what the
well-educated middle classes believe working class people are like, complete
with the occasional ishoo to try to make the unwashed think the right thoughts
on gay rights, domestic violence, and so on.

So I am
intrigued that the BBC has commissioned a prominent EastEnders figurehead to
write The Great War, which will be broadcast during Armistice Week next year as
a contribution to the centenary of the outbreak of the war.

The writer, Tony
Jordan, has a long and successful record in popular TV. He was one of the
people who did Life on Mars, which shows he has heard of the 1970s.

I do wonder,
however, whether he has a really detailed grasp of the conditions prevailing in
Britain in 1914.

Here is Mr
Jordan, quoted by the Mail on Sunday, about his forthcoming World War One epic:
‘Back then, no-one knew what a world war meant. It was all going to be over by
Christmas and so all the kids dashed in – it was the equivalent of an iPod
craze.’

That’s three
all-time favourite Great War clichés and a crashingly crude anachronism all in
just 33 words. If the final programme keeps up that rate with one cliché for
every 11 words of script, it should be well worth watching.

Didn’t
know what a world war meant? Does that mean the army, which had the sharpest of
lessons about modern firepower in the Boer War and plenty of expertise in
digging trenches? Does it mean the increasingly literate population which had
been devouring bestsellers about the threat of German arms?

All over by
Christmas. Sure. Everybody thought that, without exception. That was why the
1914 Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, made his famous remark about, ‘don’t
bother to put the lights out, we’ll be back for a party next Thursday night.’

All the
kids dashed in, like an iPod craze. Of course. It was, man, like that DJ
Kitchener dude was rapping about your country needs you in his drum ‘n’ bass
act down the nightclub in Accrington, and, like, they all signed up.

I look
forward to more. The 1914 Christmas truce, beloved of every left-wing writer,
should be a treat. Perhaps this time we’ll get Tommy and Fritz comparing notes
about how they gave up smoking. Instead of cigars they will share a bottle of
Malibu.

We’ll get the
home front, with the music halls doing their bit for the recruitment drive.
Brucie was probably doing a series of Strictly Come Fighting at the time. Some
Edwardian Ant and Dec will be shown mocking the rich and famous in Get me Out
of Here, I’m a Celebrity, in which all the sons of general, politicians and
profiteers will be alleged to have dodged the front line.

There will be
heroic anti-war protesters, cruelly kettled and bayonet charged off the steps
of St Paul’s. I wonder if Vanessa Redgrave is still available for a role?

The generals
will all be stupid, cowardly and callous.

I would say the
scene in which Tommy and Fritz wind up hiding in the same shell hole in the
middle of a battle is a racing certainty, not least because Mr Jordan has told
us that one of his heroes will be a British soldier and the other an
18-year-old German. The chances of them not meeting in the TV series are surely
impossibly remote.

Traditionally in
this scene one soldier kills the other and then finds pictures of the new widow
in his tunic, and reads the dead enemy’s last letter to her. The 2014 version
will probably update this to an e-mail.

Mr Jordan
justifies his treatment of the war as follows: ‘If there’s a moron in Tunbridge
Wells who thinks that what we’re commemorating is beating the s*** out of the
Germans, then all I can say is these are the kinds of people who made the war
happen in the first place.’

Personally, I do
not remember a single veteran of either world war who wanted to commemorate beating
the s*** out of the Germans. The motivation of those who commemorate the wars
has always seemed to me to be overwhelmingly a wish to mark the sacrifice of
comrades. The triumphalists Mr Jordan so despises are actually as thin on the
ground as lifelike characters in EastEnders.

There may be
behind this a wish not to offend modern Germany. That is a Germany which has
for 60 years been a model of peaceful democracy, a country which has given its
economic success and its treasured currency to the rest of Europe and received
only abuse and begging in exchange, and where you never hear politicians or
commentators going on about how good it would be to retrieve the lost homelands
in the East.

But Kaiser
Bill’s Germany wasn’t like that. The reason the First World War happened, and
the Second too, was nothing to do with jingoistic morons in Tunbridge Wells,
and everything to do with the German army’s habit of finding itself in other
people’s countries.

Which brings us
to Brussels, a place that seems to crop up quite a lot when you look at British
history.

If you think the
BBC is doing an injustice to the realities of the Great War – which our side
won, by the way – you just wait until 2015. If nothing rings a bell, there’s a
little place just to the south of Brussels called Waterloo.

There was a
battle there, in June 1815, in which the British army, assisted as it happens
by the Germans, did for a French bloke called Napoleon and in so doing
established an order that kept this country out of major wars for almost a
century.

David Cameron
has yet to announce any Government funding for the bicentenary. Perhaps he’s
looking for a way to do it without offending the French.

It’s easy. Just
commission the BBC to do a miniseries. They’d do one with lots of Luddites,
privileged generals, starving workers, grisly punishments for child thieves,
and beautiful oppressed radical heroines. And they wouldn’t once embarrass us
all by mentioning world-conquering French dictators.

Share this article:

10 April 2013 7:31 PM

The response to Margaret
Thatcher’s death has surely demonstrated that her reputation in the front rank
of political leaders is secure.

It’s not the
anarchist street parties or the resentment of union leaders or the baleful
comments of Gerry Adams. It’s not the verdict of former colleagues or friendly
historians.

It’s the way
politicians and others are scrambling to claim that she was someone who saw
things their way, and who would, were she only able, be among their supporters
now.

This happens
only with the greatest leaders. Winston Churchill, for example, who crops up
regularly as a pro- or anti-European, depending on who is making the speech.

Abraham
Lincoln, a leader so divisive that he really does make Margaret Thatcher look
like St Francis of Assisi, has over the last century or so been claimed as an
inspiration and a forerunner by just about every political faction in the US, including
the communists and the fascists.

The ‘she was one
of us’ tendency with Baroness Thatcher began within 24 hours of her death, when
Ken Clarke went on the radio to announce that she was a pro-European and the
landmark Bruges speech was friendly to Brussels. Funny, I don’t remember it
that way, but that’s what Ken says.

Then there was
Lord Deben, or John Gummer as he once was, telling us how Lady Thatcher was a
prophet of climate change, in the vanguard of those fighting to save the world
from the deadly danger of fossil fuels.

What is John
Gummer doing now? He is chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, a quango
of increasingly doubtful use in the face of the unfortunate reluctance of
global warming predictions to come true.

Even Peter
Tatchell recruited her to his favourite cause. ‘Thatcher
once unintentionally praised me,’ Mr Tatchell reminisced. ‘It happened in 1981
in the House of Commons….this was the first and last time she ever described me
as honourable.’

Historians
now assembling their assessments of the 1980s will be grateful for this detail
of how the life of one of the greatest figures of the modern age was briefly
influenced by Margaret Thatcher.

The
flip side of the ‘one of us’ coin is the way critics are ascribing to her
magical powers to do evil, much in the way the Witchfinder General would have
accused his victims.

Prominent among them is Ken Livingstone, who has been blaming Lady Thatcher,
who fell from power in 1990, for the collapse of the banking system in 2007 and
2008.

On
that timescale, the iceberg that sank the Titanic was responsible for the Wall
Street Crash.

One
bloke from Yorkshire was reported, on the BBC of course, blaming Margaret
Thatcher for his divorce. Her handling of the miners’ strike, seemingly, had ‘a
ripple effect that drove a wedge between us’.

The
miners, yes. My own strongest memory of the great strike comes from a picket
line in Mansfield in 1984, when a group of them decided, on the basis of their
general regard for reporters, to beat me up. They would have qualified for
early membership of Hacked Off. My sentimental regard for the Durham miners
went down a bit after that.

The
scale of Margaret Thatcher’s victory over the unions is best summed up in an anecdote
told by my esteemed former colleague David Norris. Nozzer was among a group of
bored industrial hacks covering a TUC conference in Blackpool towards the fag
end of the eighties. There was nothing to write about.

This
was because the once-militant unions were smashed and watching their membership
decline to nothing. Moderate unions were rushing to sign no-strike deals with
Japanese car firms. The former barons were retreating to the public sector,
where they could make nasty noises but were incapable of real harm, a bit like
Sauron after the ring got thrown into Mount Doom.

No one was interested. So the hacks were in the pub, working out if they could
do a security story, since Mrs Thatcher was due in town for the Tory conference
in a couple of weeks. Searching the hotels with sniffer dogs? Been done.
Marksmen on the roofs? Done that, too.

My
colleague suggested they could invent a Royal Navy nuclear submarine, waiting
off the end of the pier to prevent any seaborne IRA attack. Ha ha ha. Much mirth.
Whose round is it, chaps?

After a convivial evening, he retired to bed. Around midnight the hotel phone
started ringing off the wall. It was the office. ‘Have you seen front of the
Daily Blah? There’s a submarine off the beach to stop IRA rubber boats. Get
down there quick.’

The
next day the Blah’s photographer arrived to get the picture. ‘Where’s the
submarine?’ he asked his reporter. Reply: ‘You can’t see it. It’s under the
water.’

The
best tribute at Lady Thatcher’s funeral will come, I feel, the night before,
when, channel hopping to 24-hour news, we see a blonde standing on Blackfriars
Bridge. Her glamorous looks will have been slightly dented by the lashing rain
and the teeth-grinding cold. The camera will zoom over her shoulder towards the
swirling waters below.

As
we gaze at the murky depths, she will intone: ‘Security chiefs have left
nothing to chance. A Royal Navy nuclear submarine has been stationed in the
Thames, to forestall any attack by Al Qaeda in speedboats...’

Share this article:

02 April 2013 5:58 PM

THE BBC is rarely harsh in
judgement on itself, and the welcome its news outlets have given to the arrival
of the new director general has been firmly in line with tradition.

I listened to the
Corporation’s flagship radio news programme, which had a discussion on the
matter. Taking part were one presenter, one former chairman of the BBC, and a
distinguished former editor of Newsnight, who later went on to lead the
advertising-funded BBC World News channel.

When she left it
two or three years back, she was able to make the proud claim that it ‘got very
close to break even’.

What happens to
a corner shop, a plumbing business, or a privately-run television station that
gets very close to break even? If you wish to post your answer, the Today
Programme takes comments too, 1,000 characters maximum.

It is possible
to listen to this stuff and take away the impression that the BBC doesn’t think
much of outsiders. It seems you must have the deep understanding of the
Corporation and its values that can be gained only from working for it before
you can be allowed to discuss its affairs.

Reverence for
that special understanding of the BBC applies in particular to its leadership.
You will not need to be reminded that the new director general, Tony Hall, or
Baron Hall of Birkenhead to the likes of us, joined the BBC in 1973, straight
out of Oxford, and stayed there for nearly three decades.

He quit to get
more experience of the gritty side of life as chief of the Royal Opera House
before going back to the top job.

We must be fair
to Lord Hall. He has already hired a troubleshooter as ‘director of strategy
and digital’ to help ‘define the BBC and public service broadcasting for the
next decade.’

Who is this new
broom? It’s James Purnell, former Labour Culture Secretary, whose experience of
digital culture includes the use of new technology by a hospital to paste his
image into a picture of a promotional event at which, unfortunately, he could not
be present.

Has Mr Purnell
ever worked for the BBC? You don’t need me to tell you, do you? Head of
Corporate Planning, 1995-97.

The consensus
among these worthies appears to be that to secure the BBC’s future a touch on
the tiller may be necessary, possibly involving its news coverage.

And who better
to give an opinion on that than our former Newsnight editor and World News
chief, Sian Kevill?

Long before
the days of Jimmy Savile and Lord McAlpine, Miss Kevill was the Newsnight
editor who responded to the Cabinet resignation of Peter Mandelson by staging
an on-air discussion involving a Labour cabinet minister, a former Mandelson
aide, and a Mandelson friend. How we all laughed, except the usual carpers
going on about a one-party state.

May I make an
alternative and slightly more radical suggestion for the future of the BBC?

BBC news does
not need a touch on the tiller. It needs an axe. It is smug, self-regarding,
sloppy and overwhelmingly biased. It failed to report 15 years of mass
immigration despite the deep concern of its audience; it has been unforgivably one-sided
over the climate change scare and still is; it has for 20 years tried
ceaselessly to paint Eurosceptics as flat-earthers, and it has failed in that
too.

Fortunately, we
have a model for what to do with a monopoly public corporation that has become
too big, is run entirely by its own insiders, and which throws away vast sums
of public money. Let’s ask ourselves, what would Dr Beeching do if, instead of
prescribing the future of British Railways in 1963, he was made chairman of the
BBC in 2013?

The railways
were losing around £1.3 billion a year in modern money in 1963. The BBC licence
fee alone now raises £3.5 billion a year. Room there, I think, for a little
Beeching-style rationalisation.

So, let’s think
about cutting a few little-used branch lines. How about shutting BBC Three and
merging BBC Two and BBC Four? The new chairman should also close a number of
radio stations with small audiences. If the private sector wants to take them
over, fine. Otherwise, pull up the tracks.

That awful
website can go, except for a skeleton news service and replays of broadcast
programmes. All the local radio stations should go to independent owners, in
the cause of breaking monopoly and developing, what is that word the BBC loves?
Oh yes, diversity.

Radio One surely
has to be sold off. It is hard to believe that over the past 45 years private
owners could have done worse with the spiritual home of Jimmy Savile. I would
have spared Radio Two, but, since we now know its listeners think the best
album ever is by Coldplay, closure would be merciful.

The remaining
mainline broadcast channels would be ruthlessly held to their public service
commitments. This would mean an end to phone-ins on Radio Three and, just
possibly, popular entertainment might become better and more popular.

BBC news
programmes love to quote people who say they want to pay high taxes to secure a
better NHS, higher benefits and so on. Well, I would be happy to continue to
pay my licence fee, as long as in future half of it went towards restoring
railway links to places like Padstow, Aldeburgh and Hawick.

There are those
who argue that the Beeching closures saved the railways. I cannot say if they
are right, but slicing up a quarter of the BBC would do the Corporation nothing
but good.

In Beeching’s
day, governments loved to close railways, just as they love to nurture the BBC
now. Closing the railways was, however, one of the most unpopular acts of the
state in a century. I suspect cutting back the BBC would cheer us all up no
end.